2010 Architecture & the City Film Series

Celebrate the relationship between architecture and celluloid through these documentary films, which spotlight the built environment, the architectural profession and the ever-mythical architect’s ego.

In 1908, when Frank Lloyd Wright was considered the most innovative architect in Chicago, he traveled to Mason City, Iowa, to design a unique, mixed-use city block—a bank and an adjoining hotel facing a park.

Soon scandal and tragedy would ruin his career, but the Park Inn Hotel would remain as one of his last Prairie style structures. Through rare archival footage, period music and a look at stunning Wright masterpieces, this film offers a provocative, ironic tapestry of an American century, tracing the life, death and rebirth of a Midwest downtown through the prism of The Park Inn. During the 20th century, The Park Inn faced alterations and degradation while Mason City dealt with a Dillinger Bank robbery in the 1930s, an economic downturn in the1960s and the label “Porn City” in the 1970s. In an effort to promote heritage tourism, the city struggled to fund renovations of The Park Inn in the 1990s and attempted an economic revival with a $20 million tribute to the musical comedy, “The Music Man,” based on Meredith Willson’s boyhood in Mason City.